My Father s House (1947)

It is a poignant yet thoroughy heartening story which Herber Kline and Meyer Levin tell in "My Father's House," a feature picture which they produced in Palestine with an all-Palestinian cast of actors and which opened at the Ambassador yesterday. For it is the irresistible story of an 11-year-old Jewish boy's search for his lost Polish parents in Palestine, of his vast grief when he discovers that they are dead and of the eventual revival of his spirit through the love of a community of friends.

Indeed, it is such a poignant story and so reflective of experience in recent years that its impact conspicuously emerges through its telling in a clipped, declarative style. And that is perforce the manner in which it is told on the screen (having already been told by Mr. Levin in a novel which he prepared from his script).

Lacking experienced actors and the facilities for close precision work (that is to say, the daily "rushes" were not available to the director as he went along), Mr. Kline and Mr. Levin were compelled to narrate their tale in a crude, matter-of-fact continuity rather than through a fabric of subtle emotional scenes. And they were forced, we suspect, to settle for many signs of amateurishness which they eschewed.

Thus, there are obvious lapses in the screening of this story of a boy, smuggled ashore with a company of European Jewish refugees, who makes a gallant and persistent search through Palestine for his father, long dead in Oswiecim, by whom he had been told to "meet" him there. And there are several confusing transitions between this story and the parallel career of a young woman, brutalized by the Nazis, who finds her own salvation through the lad.

But the lack of dramatic perfection should not prevent anyone with a heart tuned to genuine human feeling from being moved—and deeply moved—by this film. For Mr. Levin's simple story is so full of suggestive details and Mr. Kline (and his cameraman, Floyd Crosby) have pictured them so factually that the implications are overpowering, even when the actual performances are not. With the exception of two or three strained episodes—for instance, a discussion by three kids of the theory of metempsychosis—and a persistence in kindliness throughout, the story unfolds with cumulative sincerity and pictorial effect.

The youngster who plays the chief role, Ronnie Cohen, is clumsy when he "acts," but his face and his manner are so appealing that he brings a great warmth to his every scene. The same, on a masculine level, might be attributed to Isaac Danziger, who plays a young Jewish settler. But others in the cast, notably Irene Broza, who plays the brutalized girl, are a bit too stagey for full comfort. The dubbing of voices, in English, for some is cleverly and inconspicuously handled. Others speak English perfectly.

Although it is stated in a foreword that this picture is intended to be "a story of the people of Palestine and not its politics," the implication is plain that Palestine is the Jewish "homeland," that illegal entry is justified and that the Arabs, represented by several classes, are profuse in their friendships with the Jews.